I surprised myself by keeping my Alienware 13 R3 for almost 10 years. Longer than I’ve ever had a laptop; I’ve owned four now, including that one and they’ve all been 3-5 years or so. I don’t count desktop computers in this; they’re essentially “ships of Theseus” and are comprised of parts purchased over many years; I’ve not “fully built” a desktop computer for myself since the original one I constructed in high school in 200. Mainly, it was cool looking with RGB lighting and with a Nvidia 1060 GPU in it, and it was “good enough” at 1440p for basically all the games I wanted to play. I was happy to have it when we lived in Panama because of course, I didn’t bring a desktop with me, but I still wanted to game (the Wii U also came along for the ride but that’s essentially a Mario Kart Only console).

But it was showing its age. The little rubber feet were cracking off and leaving annoying bits everywhere I set it down. The fans were getting extremely loud, and in general it was just…slowing. In day to day use that it is; browsers mostly. For playing the same games as I was playing in 2017, it was as fine as usual, if I wanted to play those games.

I have had Frame.work on my mind for a long time now. Their goals as a company align pretty closely with mine. I love their repairability aspect. But… they didn’t have an OLED touch screen option. The Alienware kind of spoiled me with that sort of thing. I don’t use the touch aspect too much; it was one of those things that would be instinctive though; when I wanted to touch the screen, it would do what I’d expect. It’s weird for me to use laptops that don’t have a touchscreen now. But the OLED blacks and colors – mostly the jet-black blacks that only pixels that are 100% turned off can give you – that I couldn’t give up. Framework wasn’t making a screen I wanted, so I kept waiting (I wouldn’t have had the Alienware for 9 years if there had been an OLED Framework).

Randomly on Youtube I heard about ASUS’s Zenbook Duo series. It’s not a new thing – the model line has been around for at least one earlier iteration – but this new one looked particularly snazzy. Two screens, on one laptop? A removable Bluetooth keyboard covering the lower one? An intriguing, weird idea. Ever since being an adult in the tech world, I’ve loved having multiple screens for working; as many as four for my main workstation. So having two, built in, in a sleek tiny little package was appealing.

On a side note, ASUS also came out with the Zenbook Duo’s big, $4500-5500 sibling, the Zephyrus Duo, which is the same sort of idea of two screens, one laptop, but in a “gameified” sort of setup, like Alienware – 16 inch screens, Nvidia 5070 for $4500 or 5090 for $5500. But yeah – I don’t see myself moving to Panama and needing an actual “gaming laptop” again. The Zenbook Duo’s top-line option is $2600 and that has Intel’s new GPU range in it, the Arc. That should hold me for whatever light gaming I might want to do on it.

(Christine and I just passed on buying a house for a half a million dollars; after we hemmed, hawwed, and debated whether we wanted to deal with the hassle of moving to another cohousing community, the choice was taken out of our hands because someone else bought it first (it wasn’t a rapid mover; we wanted to see if the seller would come down in price at all). We both engaged in some retail therapy; she bought a new phone and laptop and clearly, I was about to as well.

Some cats are smart. Some aren’t so smart. Some owners have preferences for their furry purr beasts to be one way or the other. I found, over the years, that I loved being the parent/co-owner of fat, not-too-bright, simple tuxedo cat.

I first met Christine’s kitten, Pobedonostsev – or Po for short – only a few days after she brought him home from the Humane Society in the summer of 2008, a month or two after I’d graduated from the UW, and a month or two before I began my two year stint working in Jordan. At that point, Christine and I were cautious friends – we had dated casually in the fall and spring of 2006-2007 but I had – I hope gracefully – ended the informal relationship when I learned that she was planning to do a study abroad in Chile. My previous relationship had been long-distance for a time and I wasn’t a huge fan of distance, and I knew she had another suitor interested in her anyway – so she and I tried to retain as much of a friendship as we could over Skype during my senior year, her junior year, and when she returned, I hung out with her and her boyfriend from time to time, but of course, there was a bit of distance between us.

A sunny afternoon, she texted me and said she had gotten a kitten. She was subletting only a couple blocks from DoIT, the UW’s central IT group where I worked at the time, so after work, I stopped by, just for a few minutes, to meet the little guy. About 3 months old, he was curiously exploring her little apartment, jumping in and out of a tissue box on the floor, and generally being cute the way kittens are. Christine seemed tired. I didn’t know at the time – she told me years later – but he was apparently not a good nighttime kitten and meowed all night and she wasn’t even sure she wanted to keep him.

Fast forward a little over three years later and suddenly, I’m Po’s new step-dad, dating his mother. By this point, he’d acquired a slightly older brother (by about 9 months), Bert the orange long-haired tabby – smart, sly, and extremely possessive of his new mommy – and Po had become a Beta Cat; subdued and quiet, and shy around new people. I was such a “new person” to him, and I thought at first that he and I would not get along, as he would slink away and hide from me whenever I’d come by to visit.

But then…I discovered the diamond in the shy rough of this now-pudgy, plump housecat. With Bert having claimed Christine as “his mama” and often nipping and batting at Po when he tried pathetically to cuddle his mama, the former only child, poor simple Po was flummoxed. Perhaps because I generate large amounts of body heat or equally likely, because he had no other human option… Po began placing his bulk on me. Gingerly at first, always silently. “I require a lap because I am lonely and need companionship but this doesn’t mean I have to like the fact it is you and yours and not my mama’s.” Of course Christine felt terrible that Po had become a beta cat, and often tried to encourage him to stick up for himself against Bert, and cuddled him whenever she could, but Bert was a little shadow that had glued himself to her. Sometimes if Bert had fallen asleep on one side of her, Po could finally creep in and cuddle up against her other side without the abuse.

One of my favorite early memories of living with Po was probably around 2012 or 2013 or so. He was visiting me at my first house in Madison that I lived in alone at that time. Until that point, both cats had been getting exclusively dry food. We were still post-collegiately frugal with money, dry food was cheap and could be kept in a feeder machine. But she knew wet food was healthier and closer in texture to what a “wild cat” would be eating in terms of prey animals. Now, up until this point, ever since Bert had moved in with him, Po had been… almost silent. No meows, no trills, no caterwauling. He would sit, stare at you watchfully, head cocked with interest, but silently. But now, for the first time – the crack of the can lid. What’s this? His ears tilted forward. The dish was put in front of him. He sniffed it, took a tentative bite. Silently, he snarfed it down as fast as he could. This was incredible. How could he have missed out on this his entire life? A few days later, Christine was out and I was entrusted with the task of serving the cats their new daily can of wet food. I cracked the lid, and stopped when I heard a sound behind me. Po was staring. Leaning forward. “Mmmm….” he said. “What’s that Po? You like wet food?” I asked him. “mmmmmMMM!” emanated from his throat. And again. “MMMMMMMmmmMMM!” and then finally, like a crescendo bursting forth, he put a paw forward, plaintively, staring intently between my face and the can I was holding…”mmmmmMMMMM…MOH! MOH! MOH!” The years of silence had been broken. He’d finally found something worth shouting about. And in the derpiest, least-practiced/melodic sound possible. The phrase “MOH!” or “moh?” became an inside joke between Christine and I for “anything which is highly desired or prized” and “is this thing something that should be highly desired or prized?”

Another habit he developed around then – or at least, that he showed to me – was his curiosity around bathtubs. After I’d shower, he’d lurk around the door, watching me towel off. Then he’d come and sit at the edge of the bathroom. Then finally, one day he worked up the courage to give a tentative…licklicklick at the water stuck to my leg hairs. This became a common morning tradition; he’d hear the shower and charge in, sometimes jumping up on the edge of the bathtub between the cloth ‘show’ liner and the plastic inner one and pace back and forth, waiting for me to emerge so he could vigorously lick water off of my legs. Such a weirdo. When the tub was dry, he’d sometimes toss a hair tie into it, then fling himself in after it and writhe and roll about, chasing the hair tie. I called this “a tub in a tub” (years later, in Panama with his skinny lithe little sister Arriba who enjoyed crouching in, then bursting through a fabric play cylinder for cats, I would refer to this as “a tube in a tube.”)

By the time Christine and I bought our condo and fully integrated our lives in 2019, Po and I were on good terms (after all, I did provide his wet food a few times a week when Christine had to work late) and while he still seemed like he’d rather be with his mama, he treated me to purrs and meows/mohs, and would rub his face on my leg if he wandered past me on the way to his dry food dish (a more food-motivated cat, I’d never met).

The pandemic seemed to break something in his simple little head. His parents were now at home ALL THE TIME… not at work, leaving him with his naughty brother alone. He seemed perplexed and bemused for the first couple weeks, coming around corners as I worked at my new “home office” and looking surprised to see me, like he expected to have the bed in the office to himself.

Then…a leap into my lap. A tentative, gentle paw extended upward to my keyboard. pat….patpatpatpat. Clicky, mechanically-switched full-size keyboard makes a lot of noise when typed on, compared with laptops. Interesting. A loud, rumbling purr emits from a throat. He proceeds to curl up into a ball on my lap for the next three hours, only periodically reaching out to sleepily pat at the keyboard again. He can get used to this. Yes, this will work out very nicely. Let him clear out his daytime schedule from this point forward.

His goofy, weird, but endearing behaviors began to come through. Never much one for playing with toys, he did develop an almost obsession with a simple cotton string on a plastic wand a couple months into the pandemic. Waiting until neither human was around, he’d then pick up the end of it in his mouth and then drag it out the house, emitting loud “MOH! MOH!” MRROWWW!” sounds… all while thrusting and gyrating his hips about. We called the string his Girlfriend.

A couple weekends ago, I fulfilled a longtime goal – to bike one hundred miles (i.e. a Century, as they say) in a single go! The backstory of this was my good friend Kate (the one I did the Dead2Red 250km relay with, along with my other dear friends Branden and Caitlin back in 2015) and her husband had done the famous Door County Century (DCC) before, and because they knew I loved bike riding and punishing my body, they asked why I’d never done it. The main reason being: I’d never heard of it until they told me about it!

It was from my entreaty to my old 4-H friend Kayla, asking her if she wanted to do it with me and stay with Christine and I at my sister-in-law’s cabin in Egg Harbor, that led me to the BikeMS ride that I did a month earlier; Kayla pointed out that Iron Man in Madison would be the same weekend as the DCC, so she regretfully declined – but then told me that if I wanted to do a long grueling bike ride with her, but for a good cause instead of pleasure/pain, there was this little fundraiser called BikeMS… (and the rest is history, or at least, in a different blog post)

I set a calendar reminder back in like, August 2024 for January 1st, 2025 – the first day that you could register for the DCC 2025 (and also the cheapest; they raise the price of registration slowly over the months until they sell out of registration passes). I paid $69 to register. That includes a couple beers and dinner at the end, as well as a fully supported stops along the route (6 of them, about one every 15 miles) with all the snacks (sandwiches, fruit, and energy drinks mostly, but some of them had extra stuff – like one had squeaky cheese curds, and another had strawberry shortcake) you could eat. Pretty darn good price.

It’s a pretty great looking route; lots of coastal parts, or at least near coast (there’s so many trees/rich people houses that you can’t often see the water) but clearly there’s a reason why it’s so popular and the same basic route has stayed the same for many years.

Branden and Caitlin agreed to join us (who could pass up a free stay in a cute little cabin in the woods in Door County?) both for their own enjoyment, but also to give poor Christine an extra quartet of hands to help out with Baby Lukas while Crazy Papa was off hurting his body. We drove up separately though; it’s incredible how much “stuff” it takes to have a 3-month old infant on a 3 night trip. Stroller in the trunk, play mat for him to kick his Lil’ Lukas Legs on, “rocker” seat device to put him on when he tires of play mat – anyway, so much stuff to bring. I think the era of transporting friends to things when we go on trips is behind us for awhile.

The four of us had a relaxing Saturday before the Sunday ride – took some walks around the Egg Harbor subdivision where the cabin is located with the baby in the stroller, and had dinner together at a folksy log cabin themed supper club that had a pretty good stroganoff special. Luke got way, WAY too overstimulated + overtired by his stimulation, by the artwork and log motif of the restaurant and flipped the hell out about halfway through the meal and cried uncontrollably, but other than that, it was great!

I left for the ride alone with my brother’s bike strapped to the back of the Crosstrek at about 7:30AM – it takes about half an hour to drive down to the ride’s start/end point in Sturgeon Bay. They don’t do a single “ready set go” for everyone – it’s very specifically and repeatedly mentioned that this is not a race, it’s a fun ride, and they don’t encourage the idea of it being a race. They recommend that you know your own speed and plan to start between 6am and 10am in order to attend the dinner, which goes from 4-6pm. Using my BikeMS timing of about 4.5 minutes per mile, I knew what I’d need. However, I’ll tell you right now – I didn’t factor in the fact there were six rest stops, and that I would definitely be making use of their restful capabilities. It took longer than I thought since I stayed at each one except the last one for 15, even 25 minutes depending on how wiped I felt.

It seemed like almost everyone had a buddy or a dozen of them to ride with. I looked around the starting point for other solo riders but I didn’t see anyone alone. Since I had a jersey number to pin onto my back and I was too shy to talk to anyone, I had to strip off my bike jersey and pin my own number onto the cloth rather than having someone to do it for me. I miss my old group rides in Madison – hard to believe it was over a decade ago I was doing stuff like this, it feels like a lifetime.

Enough nostalgic moping – I had a century to travel. I realized very early on, in the first dozen miles, that I was not quite properly dressed for this. I’d never been “cold” on a bike ride before but that 8am September air on a peninsula…? Yeah, the wind was brisk. One woman biking past me with her gal pals, commented “don’t you want to put your windbreaker on?” and I replied “I don’t have one!” and she said, as she and her multi-thousand dollar bike disappeared ahead of me “wow, you’re braver than I am.” I was just in my old jersey from Jordan, Cycling Rome to Mecca (now we’re talking 16 years ago! good lord where does the time go) and some bike shorts. It did get slightly warm right around noon when the sun came out but it was just chilly, cloudy Sunday for the most part. My legs were extremely sore and stiff by about a third of the way in, worse than I could ever remember them being. I don’t think I warmed up and stretched properly before the ride – I had figured that since I would be biking slowly, leisurely, and relaxingly (not a word) I would “warm up” naturally on the ride. The problem was that since it wasn’t warm, that never happened, so my muscles, even as miles piled onto them, never got properly ‘warmed’ – oof. I was walking bowlegged like I’d been on a horse’s saddle instead a bike saddle for a day or two afterward. My bony old behind is not padded enough.

The cars were pretty nice for us too. I believe this is the 47th year the ride has been happening, and it’s slightly outside the main window for tourism in Door County, so the locals remaining aren’t the sort to be jerks to bicyclists (also they know the sort of tourist bikers who spend thousands of dollars on racing road bikes are the sort to spend lots of money in their quaint little shops, too, so why piss them off). Several times along the ride, locals were just out on their grass in lawn chairs, holding signs that said stuff like “good job, you can do it!” and cheering us on. They might have been looking for a friend or something, but they’d cheer anyone who went past them. That was nice. Since the ride’s start/stop was in the Door County fairgrounds, I asked one of the adult volunteers if all the youngish looking people who were also helping out were 4-H kids, and was told no, they were the local high school band kids. The youngsters were all real nice and friendly too.

Let’s see, what was the worst part of the ride? Well that’s easy to tell you – click on the map link again, the one of the main route, and move your cursor on the chart at the bottom, showing mile 64 through 68. See how the route is going due west? Yeah… turns out that the peninsular winds often blow from the west to the east. So that area there, real flat (but also some uphills) not in the coastal forest, right into the wind – was just awful, awful riding. I think I was doing an average speed of 9-11 MPH there. In contrast, you see the next section on the map, where we’re going from mile 71 to 74 almost due east? That was great! We were zooming along with the breeze, I could tell my fellow riders near me were also having a great time after the slog that previous section had been.

Right around that point there, a young woman who I’d passed, and been passed by, a few times in the previous few hours started chatting with me. Her name was Dawn, and she’d been biking the route with a friend of hers but then that friend started to not feel well, so she took one of the shorter loops (oh yes I didn’t mention; you can also do 30, 50, or 70 mile route options, it’s not just 100 miles) and ended early and now Dawn was by herself. As naturally chatty and gregarious as I am, Dawn and I bantered about biking; bikes and routes (she’d done many century rides before, but she was a relative newcomer to Wisconsin, working for Milwaukee Tool as an engineer and had never been to Door County before) and just generally enjoyed each other’s company through the final stretches. She was a mere 25 years old and filled with energy, good vibes, and positivity.

We biked through the finish line together, she congratulated me on a great first century ride, complimented my cute baby son (of course I talked about him, and used him as an excuse as to why I hadn’t trained as much as I should have probably (sorry Luke)), and then disappeared into the crowd to find her friend who had been waiting for her for hours. I hope she had a great trip to Door County and enjoys her new life/career in Wisconsin!

Branden and Caitlin had to head back home immediately after, but Christine and I stayed one more night in the cabin; I knew that my legs would barely be in enough state to stand/walk, much less to sit and work car pedals – and being exhausted for a 3 hour drive back down to Madison wouldn’t help either. It was a very quiet, relaxing night – I heard from the three Luke caretakers that he had been a pretty sleepy boy and well behaved; good to know after his log-cabin-fueled meltdown the previous evening.

Anyway, I’m glad I did it! Maybe Lukas will love bicycling as much as I do. Maybe in 3-4 years Christine and I could do the 30 or 50 mile ride with him in a trailer behind one of us (she’s got the e-bike now, I’m sure that can tow just fine) to get him exposed to it. Maybe in 7-8 years he’ll want to do the 30 mile ride with us. We’ll see! For now though, I’m glad I did it when he’s still a small portable baby instead of a larger, less portable toddler with more opinions and tantrums and that sort of thing.

Like a lot of kids, I wore braces in middle school. My mom did too; it was her idea to get me to do it in middle school so I’d have a chance of being more popular in high school. Like a lot of kids, I wasn’t very good at wearing my post-braces retainer. Turns out when you’re not the one shelling out $6000 for the hardware and procedure, you don’t care very much! I had a so-called permanent retainer put on my lower front teeth a few years later, probably in 2002 or so, to keep them and only them straight, and then promptly ignored my top and bottom retainers for the next several decades. I found the things mouldering away in their little blue box sometime during my years at Marston Ave, was horrified by how groddy they looked, and threw them away.

Sometime in 2013 or 2014 or so, I ate a piece of sticky candy from the middle east given to me by a friend, it was crunchy and covered in nuts. It pulled the permanent retainer right off my teeth and I swallowed it. I didn’t notice it until brushing my teeth around 1am or so before bed. Hello, hospital please? Yes, can I get an x-ray of my esophagus to make sure a metal wire isn’t lodged halfway down? Alright, all good. Do I want another permanent retainer put on, the dentist asked at my next appointment. No, why would I? I’m a big boy man now, my teeth won’t move anymore.

somewhere an orthodontist laughs softly in the darkness

Fast-forwarding to 2022 or so – Christine and I had just gotten married the previous year. Now that she knew she had her beautiful hooks into me for real, she occasionally remarked that hmm, my lower teeth were looking a bit… jutting. In the past decade or so, one of my front upper teeth had decided it was going to cross in front of the other front tooth, probably to escape from the jagged snaggles of the lower front teeth. I didn’t want to admit it, but that fateful 2014 decision to not get another permanent retainer may have not been the right one.

Armed with a recent raise and the power of the Delta Dental PPO Plus Premier – Select Plus (so good they put plus in the name twice) insurance which would cover, oh, $2000 or so of the approximately $6000 cost – I decided to go down the rabbit hole again in May 2023. Dental Health Associates (DHA), a well-known company in Madison that bought my previous dentist Kathleen Kelly’s private practice on the capitol square about a decade ago and did pretty well with it as their new ‘downtown branch’ had an orthodontia service as well, one Dr. Shasker over on the east side, only a 5 minute drive from where I live. I got to like Dr Shasker and his team of technicians over the past 2.5 years – they loved to banter with each other, crack jokes, and listen to good music (to my millennial standards at least) off an old record player next to the dental chairs. I like to think I was a model patient – always wore my rubber bands to re-align my jaw, and flossed well… if not every day, at least every other day. I wasn’t going to screw this up.

But on Sept 3, the “fun times” (okay that might be stretching it; eating rice and anything with gluten in it has been a nightmare since getting these on due to the after-cleanup) had to come to an end. When they told me two weeks earlier that the time had come and that I’d need to sign a waiver stating that I was content and happy with the results of my treatment, I started peering at my mouth in the mirror closely. I noticed a tiny jut on one of the lower front teeth above the other one, no more than a half millimeter or so, which Dr S obligingly sanded right off with his power tools. I signed the waiver.

I signed up for two long bike rides this year – originally on New Year’s Eve, the Door County Century (100 miles) – and then when I invited my friend Kayla to join me for that one, she lamented that she was busy already doing the Ironman the same day, but said I should consider joining her for the 75 mile fundraiser for a cure to Multiple Sclerosis, BikeMS. I fundraised $2000 over the past several months, helped Kayla’s (and now my) team, Team CCC, hit $1 million dollars in lifetime fundraising dollars. This was the post-ride success email I sent out to the fundraisers the day after the ride, which was on August 2. Here it is for everyone else to see too.

Hello everyone – yesterday was the BikeMS ride, and I’m proud to say I completed it – and it was your donations that got me there! So thank you – so very much! My group of riders, the ~30 of us that make up Team CCC crossed a major milestone this past Monday as well – one million dollars raised by the team over its lifetime! I am proud to say that you and I both raised $2000 of that. The minimum required to join the ride was only $300 so I’m so proud and thankful to you all for helping me and Team CCC hit and surpass some major milestones to raise money for MS research.

A little bit more detail (well it’s me writing so – perhaps a lot more detail if you’re curious) about the ride. First of all, to my surprise – it wasn’t actually 75 miles! It was only 72. Broken up into 3 loops of 22, 22 and then 28 that are also easy, medium, and then hard in relative difficulty, of course the ride is designed so that people who live with MS can also participate at whatever number of loops they feel comfortable doing.

We started at 7:30 in the morning (the home base is the Ho Chunk Casino that’s between-ish of Wisconsin Dells and Baraboo) – I had already had an early morning start getting up at 4:30 and then driving the hour up to eat breakfast with the team at 6. The weather was perfectly cool and breezy, but nice and sunny – exactly what you’d hope for an activity where you’re generating your own heat via exercise. This ‘easy’ loop was indeed just that – the hills were gentle slopes up and down that would be maybe 300 feet inclines, so barely needing to change gears. All 508 riders left home base together through a typical ride ‘chute’ – each team released in the order of their total fundraising. CCC was group 5, and each team has 20-30 people in it, so we were relatively close to the front. So loop one was spent fairly closely clustered together – no matter which way I looked, I could always see at least 50-100 riders in front of and behind me. The organizers strongly discouraged headphones for safety, of course – but lots of us, including me, had bluetooth speakers or just our phones themselves out and listening to whatever inspiring music they wanted to ride to (for me it was Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories album on loop 1, and then the entire shuffled discography of Fujiya & Miyagi on the second and third loops).

Each of the loops had at least one rest stop about halfway through. Loop 3, at 6 miles longer than the previous two and by far the most challenging, had 2 stops at approximate thirds. There was no shortage of porta potties, snacks of the squeezable fruit tube variety, fresh fruit, and nuts and granola bars at each one. Multi-thousand dollar bikes were lying on their sides everywhere! Of course BikeMS isn’t for competition at all and allows bikes of any type – tandem, e-bike, recumbent, etc – there was quite the collection.

After each loop was completed (volunteers in bright blue t-shirts were always on hand at the combination start/finish line with cowbells to ring and bang on to cheer for everyone) each rider was welcome to relax, refuel with more snacks, hang out and chat, etc for as long as they want – or decide they didn’t want to do more loops, for that matter. The only request the organizers had was that each loop should be completed in order, because they only had enough volunteers to cover 2 of the loops at the time with support vehicles and manning the rest stops.

I already knew I was one of the slower members of Team CCC – I’m primarily a trail-biker on a hybrid by predilection; generally road bike events don’t interest me. Having a two month old new baby has also cramped my sleep and training ability as well! So even though CCC started out together, three quarters of them rapidly disappeared into the mass of riders and I didn’t see most of them again until the post-ride dinner. I had my Fujiya & Miyagi and beautiful Wisconsin farm scenery though so I didn’t mind being on my own. After loop one, I rested for about half an hour to cram as much water and trail mix down my gullet as I could, chatting briefly with a few other CCC riders in our shared tent who happened to be there, before heading back out.

Loop 2 was more suburban, with little diversions into cul de sacs of expensive looking Wisconsin Dells houses that may have also been AirBnBs, before going down into farmland where the rest stop, and then finally returning on the same road we went out on. The hills definitely increased for this one, but still – not bad at all for me. I got lost once on this one and saw another rider take a wrong turn too. This time, we were already getting much more spaced out vs loop 1 – instead of big masses of us there was a clump of 4-5 riders here, another clump there, and then solo riders. Being spread out meant that maybe you’d miss one of the orange, green, or blue (for loops 1, 2, and 3 respectively) colored signs. In my case, I just forgot whether green or blue was loop 2, and followed the loop 3 route instead of 2 before realizing it and turning around a quarter mile down the empty road.

After loop 2, lunch was being served at that point. As one of the “VIP” riders – something I earned thanks to all of you donors; the highest-fundraising 100 of the 509 riders were designated “VIP” and I was something like #62 – it meant my burger could also have bacon on it. Delicious. The lines were long but the camaraderie amongst all the teams was high. Most of the teams have the names of the person who they were founded by, or in honor/memory of, who had or has MS. There was very much a shared spirit of In It Together between us all. The ride has been going on since the mid 1980s and some of the riders had been doing it since almost the very beginning.

Loop 3 did bring the challenge at last! For multiple reasons: 1) I was filled with burger 2) it was now 1pm and the sun, while still not scorching, was definitely making its presence known 3) I was now tired, obviously, from the previous 44 miles 4) it was, of course, the loop that was meant to be the hardest. But I pledged to you, wonderful donors, that I would do 75 miles, so Loop 3 would be completed. I had 4 hours; they said they wanted to get the volunteers back to home base at 5. Plenty of time!

Now on the final loop, at least for the entire first third on the way to rest stop 1, I saw no more than a dozen riders. By this point, I got the feeling that the more skilled riders had already started and possibly completed the loop, and others might have wanted to wait and digest lunch a little more, and others might have decided two loops were enough. So I kind of had that route almost to myself. More beautiful farmland around Mirror Lake State Park, so thankfully at least there was lots of opportunities for shade. Some major uphills which my legs were noticing, but also some exhilarating downhills too. The second rest stop was actually inside the campground of the park, and I knew one of Wisconsin’s most famous supper clubs, Ishnala was nearby – a mere .7 miles away biking, Google Maps said! I looked at my watch – it was 3pm. Still plenty of time to stop up there for a photo, maybe even an Old Fashioned if the line wasn’t too long.

Also by this time, I had realized that 22+22+28 does not equal 75, so I was looking for ways to increase my total ride distance up to 75, so an extra 1.5 miles would help push me toward that.

Alas, Google Maps directed me towards a trail it thought that biking was allowed on (the one that goes over the bridge) but actually AT the entrance to that trail, the sign sternly said that no biking was allowed. Just in the 5 minutes I sat at that entrance, I saw a dozen campers and hikers leisurely walking themselves and often dogs through the trail, so yeah – I wouldn’t have wanted to disturb their leisure with my bike anyway. Regretfully, I turned around and reconnected back with the BikeMS event route. At least I had added .6 onto the ride.

As I solo-biked the final 6 miles toward Ho Chunk, I thought of what would be the most logical way to get the total mileage up to 75. I decided on using the roundabouts near the ride’s beginning, between the casino and the highway. So instead of turning left to complete the ride I just kept going, heading back toward the highway and then looped around three roundabouts, then headed back toward the casino again. Still not enough. So I went south along the other side of the casino and did a big loop around it, finally coming back out again near the Rider Village of tents that BikeMS was set up at – and that was that! 75.13 miles completed. I hope you all feel like you got your donation money’s worth!

Well, this email message was a little longer than I thought it would be, but that’s to be expected whenever I sit down to write anything. Baby Luke also is grateful for your contribution too!

My 10+ year old classic iPass that I bought from a gas station just on the other side of the Illinois border, has finally been retired. The nice thing is that the new, sticker-based iPass systems that they’ve started deploying, come with a “free” $10 refund that gets credited to my iPass account; that was the original $10 “rental” fee that I recall paying back in 2012 when I bought the box-shaped iPass; they would have refunded that to me if I had chosen to return the iPass for any reason, but since I never did and now they don’t use these anymore, it was returned as a credit.

I was curious what is actually inside these things, and I couldn’t find many pictures online. So as I always think to myself – if I can’t find what I want online and I have the ability to contribute something to the web, why not do it?

The box was kind of challenging to get apart. It strongly resisted even my largest flathead screwdrivers to pry it apart. So I took it down to the Linden workshop, found a half-size sledgehammer, and gave it a single whack, and a quarter of the back plastic chipped off. Then I was able to pry it apart fully with screwdrivers now that I had leverage. They definitely don’t want the average person getting in here!

Oh, also Christine is 8.5 months pregnant and I’m going to be a dad in a week or two. Exciting!